bank charges

The following was sent in by email. Clearly these suggestions need to be shared with a wider public.

Mark

**********

I noted your comments last Sunday on the rapacious charges of (all) banks in transferring money but especially UK high street banks.

There are a couple of possible ways around this I have observed.

One is to establish an Internet account in UK in Euros and transfer the GBPs into it at the commercial exchange rate. Then one is free to make the transfer on-line to one’s own Spanish bank (one needs to get the UK bank to allow the amount to be moved to, say, £10k per diem, so that one can do it in bleeding chunks). This is infinitely cheaper (or should be).

The other method is to take up what is being advertized here in Spain by the Mallorcan bank < Banco March > ! If you have accounts with them in London and in Spain they state that all transfers between the two accounts are free. Perhaps this isn’t what they meant (in terms of house purchase !!) but you might care to check it out with them and then let everyone know !? (I am not one of their employees and haven’t yet moved my account to them !).

Lastly I have been especially interested by the opening page of my ABN-AMRO Euro on-line account held in Holland which stated that under EU law all transfers using the IBAN / BIC-SWIFT on-line transfer systems between private accounts are to be free. I have transferred Euros to an account in Sweden via this system (even outside the Eurozone) and no charges were made. My Spanish bank makes a charge of 0.3% for such payments but it looks as if they’ll be obliged to cease shortly.

Finally – another tip for your readers. For money required to be spent when travelling around the EU put a bulk sterling cheque into your Spanish bank account and then use the credit card based on that same Euro account for all expenditure in the Eurozone. The placing of the cheque in the Spanish account incurs min. commission and the exchange rate applied by the banks here is the commercial one (not the tourist rate). The debits in the EU are without any charges on the card use (unlike the UK who take 2% and give an appalling exchange rate). This reduces one’s “losses” on credit card/direct debit use from over 4% on a UK card to min. levels. All my family have this system operating now and never use an UK card anywhere in the EU. Publicising this would force UK banks/credit card operators to stop ripping off their customers ?! And to open an account in Spain you do not need the blood group of your deceased maternal great-grandmother !

We are in the midst of trying to get our money from the Court in Madrid to our UK bank a/c. Because lawyers, our Spanish & uk a/cs are all Halifax, we should not pay charges as confirmed by them yesterday. HOWEVER… the procurator? of the Court appears to have had ours & Barbaras money sitting in his/her account for what will be approx 30+ days!! 😕 We are at this moment in time trying to find out how much he/she is going to charge us for giving us our money .:evil:

Can anyone comment on knowledge/experience of this? We feel this may be another little scam! It is only because my husband fired a rocket yesterday, that suddenly …our money was available!! 😕

I realise we may be in unchatered territory as not many people appear to have had their monies returned! 😉

I have recently seen an horrendous example of a friendly Spanish building society charging a huge sum simply to receive an all-charges-paid transfer from the UK.

We recently helped organise two transfers with commercial currency dealers Moneycorp and they claimed that if a Spanish bank made any charge for receiving a Moneycorp transfer then Moneycorp would itself refund the charge and take up the matter directly with Spanish bank.

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